Psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses the impact of social media on young girls on “Honestly” with host Bari Weiss.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Girls spend a lot more time on social media than boys. Liberal girls spend a lot more time than conservative girls. That didn’t used to be the case, but as we get into the 2010s, when everything gets so politicized, we get into the Great Awakening, we get into the polarization, the illiberalism that you and I have really been writing about and talking about for a long time. As we get into the era, the feeds of the liberal girls gets much more taken over by how terrible the world is, everything’s sexist, you’re not gonna get ahead. And this is like the greatest era of female progress that we’re going through. But liberal girls are sort of caught in a set of disempowering ideas. And my previous book, The Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff was exactly about that. Here’s three terrible, terrible ideas. And if you believe them, you’re almost guaranteed to be a failure in life. You know, it’s what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. And life is a battle between good people and evil people. And for liberal girls, a lot of them got sucked into that kind of mindset. And it happened on Tumblr in 2013. That was the transition point when certain ideas were developed. So that’s when girls’ mental health takes a tumble. If you graph out liberal boys and liberal girls and conservative boys and conservative girls, it’s the liberal girls who really rise first and fastest on depression. And the conservative boys are not up that much. So everyone is worse off. But being conservative seems to root you. You’re not as easily pushed into this crazy world. Being in a religious family seems to root you. And those two things seem to be protective.

RealClearPolitics Videos